UnBarbie

layout design

In 2019, Mattel released their Creatable World doll line, a toy designed with flexibility and creative play in mind. Is the doll a boy? A girl? Neither? Both? The accessories provided with the character creation kits allowed for characters to be invented and reinvented over and over, and these dolls found a cult following among queer doll collectors due to the flexibility that the kits allow with gendering the dolls.

In 2023, I completed my MA degree in Communication and Culture at York University. My thesis, titled UnBarbie, examined Creatable World dolls and their messaging of queer identities. Through the construction of miniature dioramas, the world of Creatable World is expanded beyond the original packaging and brought into a future where toys represent all kinds of children who play with them and where the freedom of self-expression is universal.

The dioramas were made to roughly 1:6 scale, the most common scale for fashion dolls, and I designed, handcrafted, printed, folded, glued, and painted most of the contents of the images, with the exception of a couple of chairs and a handful of branded and unbranded miniatures sourced from Mini Brands prize capsules manufactured by the toy company Zuru. It was a highly labor-intensive process, but it was a fulfilling one that produced work I am proud of.

In 2024, I redesigned my thesis to make it more readable outside of an academic context, a much more exciting experience that brings the writing into line with the color and energy of the images that the text is centered around. The design mimics the official branding of the Creatable World dolls, using the same colors and some of the same fonts. The layouts seen in the gallery on this page are only three pages of a complete document that complements the playful messaging, balancing out the academic purposes of original text. It was extremely labor-intensive to revisit my thesis with fresh eyes and to design such a long document, but it was worth it in order to increase understanding of the text outside of the academic realms of gender studies and queer studies.

Selected photographs from this project are featured on my Photography page. To request a PDF copy of the full, graphically-designed thesis, please reach out via the contact page or by email.

If you are looking to cite this thesis in an academic context, the complete thesis is available through the York University library with the appropriate pagination.